display all the ideas for this combination of texts
3 ideas
9167 | Frege felt that meanings must be public, so they are abstractions rather than mental entities [Frege, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: Frege felt that meanings are public property, and identified concepts (and hence 'intensions' or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Hilary Putnam - Meaning and Reference p.150 | |
A reaction: This is the germ of Wittgenstein's private language argument. I am inclined to feel that Frege approached language strictly as a logician, and didn't really care that he got himself into implausible platonist ontological commitments. |
21650 | No language is semantically referential; it all occurs at the level of thought or utterance [Pietroski, by Hofweber] |
Full Idea: For Paul Pietroski no expression in natural language is semantically referential. ....Reference to objects occurs not at the level of semantics, but at the level of thought or utterance. | |
From: report of Paul M. Pietroski (Events and Semantic Architecture [2004]) by Thomas Hofweber - Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics 07.2 | |
A reaction: Love this. It has always struck me that reference is what speakers do. Try taking any supposedly referential description and sticking 'so-called' in front of it. That seems to leave you with the reference even though you have denied the description. |
4974 | For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts [Frege] |
Full Idea: For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.196n) | |
A reaction: Given the acknowledgement here that two very different sentences in different languages can express the same thought, he should recognise that at least some aspects of a thought are non-linguistic. |